Chapter 17
DANIIL
The phone went off against the wood of the nightstand, and the sound cut through the dark like a wire. I had a hand on it before the second buzz finished. Old habit. A call at this hour is never small.
The screen lit my fingers gray. Mikhail.
I answered fast. "Yes."
"Important meeting. We need you here now."
"On my way."
I ended the call and lay there a breath longer with the phone warm in my palm. The room was still that flat blue you only get before the sun has decided to come up. Late autumn light, weak even at noon, was hours off yet.
I turned my head on the pillow.
Chloe was asleep beside me. Her cheek crushed soft into the linen, mouth open just a sliver. One bare shoulder out of the blanket. Hair a mess across her face. She made a small sound that was not quite a word and pulled the cover higher with one fist without ever waking.
I smiled. I could not help it. It happened before I noticed I was doing it.
I leaned down and pressed my mouth to her forehead. She smelled like sleep and the soap she used and something my brain had decided meant safe. She did not stir. I let my lips rest there a second longer than I needed to.
Then I got up.
I cleaned up at the sink, splashed cold water on my face, dragged a hand through my hair until it agreed to lie flat.
I dressed quiet. Black sweater, black slacks, the watch slid on at the last second.
The small scar on my left index knuckle was a pale seam in the lamplight.
I tugged the sleeve over it out of habit. I did not check the mirror.
I should have checked the mirror.
The meeting room smelled like coffee made too strong and left on its second pot.
Alek was already at the head of the table, eyepatch in place, his working blue eye flicking up the moment I walked in.
The thick scar from temple to jaw caught the lamplight.
Mikhail sprawled in his chair like furniture was a personal insult to him.
Ivan stood by the window with his arms crossed, built like a refrigerator, the bare branches outside framing his shoulders.
Alek looked at me. Looked at me a little too long.
"Are you showing off that hickey?"
I stopped halfway to my chair. "Where?"
I genuinely did not know. My hand went to my throat without me telling it to. The collar of the sweater sat a touch loose on the right side. Of course it did.
Mikhail lost it. He sat up so fast the chair squeaked. "Look at that face. Look at it. He has no idea. Brother, you walked in here like a man going to confession, and the priest is your throat."
"Mikhail."
"What? You came in like you were about to ask Alek for a raise. Meanwhile your neck is publishing a book."
Ivan exhaled through his nose. Slow. Like a kettle that had been thinking about whistling and decided against it.
"I woke up before the sun for a meeting. Not for a tour of my brother's sex life."
Mikhail turned in his chair. "Easy, Ivan. Are you pregnant?"
Ivan glared. Just glared. The kind that flattened the air for two seconds.
"Okay." Alek tapped the table once with two fingers. "Sit down."
I sat. I tugged the collar higher with what dignity I had left and folded my hands on the table. The coffee pot steamed between us. No one poured. Everyone was waiting on Alek.
Alek waited until the room was completely his.
"We found them."
The words went in flat and then bloomed.
Heat moved up the back of my neck before I had decided to be angry.
It crawled into my jaw. It sat behind my eyes.
The face I had been chasing in the dark of my own head for weeks finally had a name attached to it, and the name was being spoken in this room, in this voice, by my brother, who did not say anything he was not sure of.
I did not interrupt. I let him finish. I kept my hands flat. The skin at my temple where the small scar sat went tight the way it always did when blood found its way to the wrong places.
"Ivan."
Ivan stepped to the table. He did not sit. He never sat when he was about to deliver. He set the folder down, opened it, and went through it the way a butcher goes through a side of beef. Methodical. Unbothered.
"Marchetti," he said. "Cesare. He calls himself a businessman out of an office on Avenue Z. The wine in the front of the office is real. Everything past the back door is not."
The name landed in me the way I had known it would. Cesare Marchetti. I had not had it before this morning. I had it now. It was not going anywhere.
"His cousin Nicolo holds the money. Soft hands, hard ledger. Six nights out of seven he sleeps in a brownstone on Brighton Fourth Street. The seventh he sleeps next to a woman named Renata who believes his name is Nico Romano."
"His nephew Dario holds the muscle. Twenty-six years old. Twitchy. He is the one who drove the car the night they came for you. He was not the one who pulled the trigger. The one who pulled was a Polish hire named Tomasz Krol. We will get to Tomasz."
My hand became a fist on its own. I opened it again. Slowly.
"Cesare's wife is Lucia. She has never touched a gun. She does not need to. She runs the house on Manhattan Beach and she keeps the calendar in her head. If you want to know where any Marchetti will be on a given afternoon, the answer lives behind her teeth."
"Three houses. The Brighton brownstone is the money. A garage off Gerritsen Avenue is the muscle. A townhouse on Ocean Parkway is where Cesare sleeps when he is not at the beach. We have eyes on all three. We have ears in two."
Mikhail let out a low whistle. "Three houses for one cockroach."
"Quiet," Alek said, without looking at him. "Let Ivan finish."
"Two cops on the payroll. Detective Russo and Detective DeLuca out of the Sixtieth Precinct.
They make calls go quiet on the Sheepshead side.
A third name keeps coming up on the same envelopes.
Detective Hartigan. He takes the cash and does nothing with the work he was paid to bury. We think he is federal."
"Shipments are counted, not dated. The next is small arms. Seven moves from now. The one after that is the one that matters. Twelve from now. They will not move it through Red Hook the way the manifest will say. The real warehouse is on Coney Island Creek. Red Hook is the decoy."
He closed the folder. He pressed the cover down with his palm the way you press a lid on a pot you want to forget for a while.
"That is what we have."
My jaw hurt. I unclenched it.
"When do we get even?"
The table went still.
Ivan looked at me. Not unkind. Just looking.
"That is not your personality, Daniil. You sound reckless. You sound like Mikhail."
"Reckless my ass." Mikhail's hand smacked the table flat. "That's bravery."
"That is stupidity." Alek's voice did not rise. It did not need to. "Daniil, usually you are the one who tells us to slow down. You sit in that chair and you make us plan. That is your seat. That is what that seat does."
"I am not in the mood to be that man tonight." I heard my own voice and it came out lower than I meant. "I lost too much."
The room did not answer right away.
Mikhail was the one who spoke. Quieter than I had heard him be in a long time.
"And we almost lost you. We are not handing them another shot at you because your head is full of smoke."
Ivan, without looking up from the folder he had just closed, said, "Cheesy."
"Can you shut up?"
"I am only commenting."
"Comment less."
Alek let them finish. He always did. Then he laid his palm flat where Mikhail's had hit, like he was sealing the table back together.
"We do this slow. We do this sure. We gather more. Every man has a weakness. These men have several, and we will find each one and press until something gives."
I nodded once. The heat was still there. I shoved it down to where it would keep.
Mikhail leaned back, half a grin returning to his face like he could not stand the room being serious for longer than a minute. "We go out tonight, Daniil. I need that gift of yours. I hope it didn't vanish with your memory."
"I will try."
Alek closed the meeting with a small tip of his chin. Ivan picked up his folder. Mikhail clapped my shoulder hard enough to rattle the watch on my wrist and was gone before I could decide whether to laugh or hit him.
I walked out of the room and I kept walking.
The hallway was cold. The house was big enough that hallways had their own weather. I went past the kitchen, past the side door, and out toward the garden because that was where my feet were taking me, and I had learned not to argue with them when they wanted something.
The garden was bare. Late autumn had stripped the trees down to bone, and the grass was the dull gold it goes before the first real frost. The air in the lungs was sharp in a way that felt clean.
I saw her before she saw me.
Chloe was sitting on the low stone bench by the path, her left leg stretched out. One of the house guards, a kid named Pyotr I had hired in the spring and until this moment thought of as reliable, knelt in front of her. He had her bare foot in his hand. His other hand was on her ankle.
The heat that had cooled in the meeting room came back fast and high.
It moved up under my skin in a sheet. My hand closed at my side without my say.
Some part of me, the calm part, the planning part, the seat at the table part, went very quiet.
Some other part, older, the part with the scar at the temple, opened one eye.
Mine.
I made my feet keep their normal pace. I made my voice keep its normal place.
"What is happening?"
Pyotr's head snapped up. He let go of her foot like it was hot.
Rhea appeared from behind the bench with leaves in her hair and a stick in her hand. Seven years old, two braids, and acting like she was lawyer for the defense.